


_Black Magic

by glenarvon



Series: _Brilliancy [15]
Category: Watch Dogs (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mind Games, Social engineering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 18:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2478740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glenarvon/pseuds/glenarvon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlotte Gardner, Blume spokeswoman and interim mayor, receives some less than welcome career advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	_Black Magic

[this takes place in 2014, before fox hunt in the bad blood dlc.]

* * *

  _Audio Log: Aiden Pearce._

_"It's an elaborate con, one of the most complex ones I’ve ever played. It's my own safety net and it can just as easily break my own neck."_

* * *

Charlotte Gardner was alone in her office, working late as she usually did. It was silent, save for the quiet hum of the ventilation and it was dark, save for the light on her desk and the screen of her computer. Outside her office, a security guard was on his patrol. He was used to her schedule and didn't interrupt her. 

On some days, her secretary stuck around well into the after hours, but he still usually left her before midnight. It was now well _past_ midnight and she considered letting it go for the night and heading home, heading into a weekend. Or at least what was left of it at this point.

Being split two ways between her duties to Blume and her newly acquired responsibilities to Chicago had done nothing to increase her free-time. If she kept going like this, she would be eaten alive and it would help no one.

No, instead, she would run for mayor and leave her job at Blume behind. It would assuage those voices who worried about too much power in one hand, for one. For another, she could do a better job if she could give it her all.

The public didn't seem to quite realise the importance of loyaty here, with all their worries about her ties to Blume. Just because she would no longer be working for them, didn't mean she would forget her duty to the company. Neither did she like the thought of leaving her successor with more unsolved problems than necessary, thus her work hours.

Blume was having a difficult time, though the rest of the city didn't need to know about it. ctOS was not a secure system. She was no engineer, but she understood enough to listen to what actual engineers were telling her when she asked. Raymond Kenney _was_ ctOS. He had backdoors in his backdoors, he had trojans and viruses aplenty should he need any kind of access at all. ctOS would probably dance polka if he send the right signal. Raymond Kenney was everywhere and ctOS had been completely blinded to him.

There was no way to get rid of him now, not when so much of the source code bore his handwriting, when so much of the software was his creation. You'd have to start from scratch, completely from scratch, if you wanted to purge him. Kenney was a genius, no one with any sense would deny that. Leaning on the madness side, apparently, but it made him no less inscrutable to those who were supposed to sniff out wayward pieces of code, all the bits and hooks he had planted over the years.

Replacing ctOS was out of the question, of course. They could do it _— maybe —_ if they had a new OS to roll out, but any outage of the network would cost them, not just money, but also trust. It would paralyse the entire city and after recent events, it wouldn't go over well. People needed peace and stability now, more than anything.

Then there was the entire tiresome problem of Aiden Pearce to be dealt with. If Kenney, for all intents and purposes, _was_ the system, then Pearce was at least _in_ the system, too. Except, while there was nothing else positive that could be said about Kenney, _Kenney_ was familiar. He had trained some of their people and worked closely with others here at Blume. His tricks were at least _known,_ even if they could not, at this point, be eliminated. Pearce was an unknown on all counts and not shy to diverge from Kenney's known inroads. There was just no telling just how deep he'd buried himself in their system by now.

Pearce was invisible to ctOS. He didn't show up on scans, the systems didn't identify him, they had never been able to track him. He was a ghost, a spectre, haunting them at every turn, who never showed his face unless _he_ wanted to.

Ironically, his own fame wreaked havoc on his own sophisticated camouflage.

People on the streets recognised him and plastered pictures all over their social media accounts, they wrote about it, chatted to their friends, mentioned it in emails and phone calls. You could get to him that way, certainly. In the beginning, everyone had been optimistic, they could map his movements just using the trace he left on other people's digital footprints. Yes, Chicagoans professed their admiration and respect for him, but they didn't seem to quite realise he was a wanted criminal, too.

Eventually, patterns would have to emerge from this raw and random data, she knew as much and from that pattern, Pearce would find himself caught in a web woven entirely by his most fervent cheerleaders. That, at least, had been the idea she pitched to the police mere days after she came into office as interim mayor.

Except, it never came through. A few weeks earlier, popular photo apps started showing severe geolocation malfunctions. In fact, all locations, regardless of where the picture was obviously taken, would be pinpointed, without fail to the same location in the Russian tundra. And a little while later, all pictures presumably depicting the vigilante were badly blurred out.

Gardner sighed as she skimmed through the mail the engineers had sent her. Basically, what happened was that the phone would scramble the images themselves, once they picked up a certain signal. What signal? No idea. How can you tell the shape of a key by looking at the lock?

Can't you?

It's not so easy.

So there was that. On bad days, she hoped Chicagoans would eventually just tire of him, tire of the constant chaos that followed him, inevitably, through the city. One day, one too many innocent bystanders would have been hurt in whatever crusade he thought he was on. They needed just one person, in the end, only one to point a finger and say _I know where he sleeps._

Then there was DedSec. There was a rumour going around that some of their own employees were secretly funnelling information their way. Nothing had ever be confirmed or proven, no names had come up that couldn't be dropped after just an hour of investigation. But the ease with which DedSec came and went implied there was more to it than just grapevine.

DedSec are a strange little unity, she thought. Anarchistic. _Archaic,_ come to think of it. A bunch of kids, hung up on hippie ideals they were probably too young to even remember, it always seemed to her, always on the edge of going that one step too far toward radicalisation. They'd tear it all down, the work of so many, the _betterment_ of so much, on nothing more than idle, juvenile fantasy.

She didn't think DedSec understood their own role in all of this, or knew where they wanted to go. They had no goal for the future she could discern in any of their piggybacked message. They were just _against Blume._ Not much of an agenda. It would be a mistake to dismiss them because of it, of course, they could and did do substantial damage. If there was some way to take them out of the game, Gardner already had the press release ready. She had enjoyed writing that one.

And then, there was one last thorn she needed to survey tonight. A new hacker had been making the rounds for a few weeks. Hellbent, more than any of the others, just to do as much damage as he could and if damage couldn't be had, he'd settle for mayhem. Blume was a favourite target, but all public authority seemed fair game, the police especially. Just recently, Blume had been called in to rectify what turned out to be a massive system breach within Chicago PD's internal servers wherein all passwords had been set to 'yourmother'. Occasionally, well-to-do citizens of Chicago would find they had donated substantial amounts of money to charity, though apparently without having been asked first.

He was obviously hung up on some backwards idea of Robin Hood, this particular hacker, but that didn't make him anything less of a threat. He liked to sign his work, too, called himself BlackMage. Eventually, this piece of egotism would lead to his capture, making it easier to track him.

DedSec had disavowed him, the same way they habitually did with Pearce. Gardner wasn't sure why DedSec would bother with either. It seemed like a tactical mistake. Why not present a united front for your enemy and keep your internal disagreements, well, _internal?_

It was what she always advised on such things, but apparently DedSec neither had, nor perhaps wanted, a PR professional. Far be it from her to begrudge her enemies such a mistake.

A small red flag lit up at the bottom of her screen, followed by a popup demanding her immediate attention and it made the blood in her veins run cold. _This_ was what they had been waiting for for a long time, never sure _if_ it would ever come. The message would be sent to any executive still in the building when it happened. And since it wasn't exactly her area of expertise, there were no others.

She sat, hands still hovering above the keyboard. She could set off a silent alarm. She _should_ do it, probably, mobilise their security personnel instantly instead of leaving them blind and in the dark about the threat. If this was it, at all, and therein lay the problem. Circumstantial, flimsy clues, if that. Nothing more to go on, the last trap designed when no one at Blume had any idea left what else to do.

Black glass walls set her office apart from her outer office, all of it sheathed in low late-night illumination and a great expanse of darkness.

The sliding door opened, quietly moving on its rails. Never before had it occurred to her just how little protection a wall of glass offered. But these were her innermost thoughts and she was a professional, well-versed in handling difficult and delicate situations. If you lost your composure, you lost everything.

She forced the lump in her throat down and plastered earnest calm and mild surprise on her face, watched as the vigilante stepped from the shadows and into the small circle of light cast from her desk. Easy to recognise him, even if he hadn't come the way he had. What little untampered footage of him they had, they had analysed to death, but the reality of him, the sheer, solid _three-dimensionalit_ y of him was something she hadn't expected. Not quite as hulking as she expected, tall, but not huge, not as broad. If she didn’t know who he was, she’d let him buy her a drink, she supposed.

But she knew who he was, perhaps better than many others. That cap he always wore, it shadowed his face even now, the weathered leather coat, fraying edges and battered in one too many firefights. Chicago’s bogeyman. The vigilante. Perhaps ‘know’ was not the word for it, after all.

The heavy fall of the coat hid any weapons he might be wearing underneath it, hands tucked away in the pockets and he looked almost too casual, like this was _nothing,_ like walking into a top floor office of Blume was something he'd do on a slow Sunday evening to stave off boredom.

"How many families will I have to give news of their loved ones deaths?" she asked.

"None, coming in." he said quietly. His voice was very deep. They had no recording of it. "Leaving, will be up to you."

She looked down at her screen and the notice still visible there. She said, "I knew you'd be coming. We are keeping statistics of equipment malfunction. In the last hour they increased by 97.6%."

She looked up. "You're like a demon out of some medieval tale: portents precede your arrival."

"Yeah," he said, unimpressed. "And you did nothing to stop me."

If he worried about potential traps, he gave no sign of it. And it _had_ been meant to be a trap, but it wasn't set, they didn't know he'd ever come or that the statistics were anything more than shots in the dark.

"Why are you here?" she asked. "What do you want?"

He didn't answer immediately, elected instead to pace a few steps, the length of her office, stopping by a corner and turning to face her again.

"I heard you were running for mayor," he said and it was an obvious opening move. DedSec had certainly already picked up on it and were campaigning against her with everything they had. So far, people seemed more annoyed by DedSec's hi-jacking of their newscasts than swayed by what they were saying. Gardner hadn't quite expected Pearce on the same bandwagon.

"Why wouldn't I?" she asked with a levity she certainly didn't feel. "I have been doing the work and I do it well. Don't think I don't know what you did. You turned Chicago into a battlefield and these scars are a long way from being healed. What Chicago needs now is…"

"Anything but another speech," he interrupted and she fell silent as if he'd put her on mute. He paced back to the centre of the room, stepped forward so he was facing her across the desk.

"I did some digging," he said. "And you know it's strange, your biography is exemplary. Perfect little family, idyllic childhood, good grades all the way back. You were class representative three successive years and you won a school beauty pageant once. Commendation letters from teachers and professors. Blume hired you right out of college. You live in a surprisingly modest apartment in the Loop."

It was strange to listen to him recite all these things without much inflection or indeed, any indication what he thought about any of it. Of course, most of her personal information was public, in her position, trying to keep secrets rarely paid off.

"You've been with your partner, Simon Ahern, for eight years now," Pearce continued in the same low, neutral tone. "But you're going to announce your engagement pretty soon, obviously, because…"

"How do you know that? We told no one!"

"Engagement party invitation concepts on Simon's laptop," he said and the first show of emotion at all seemed to be faint amusement. "Drop the golden flower design, if you want my opinion, it's a bit too much."

She narrowed her eyes. "If this is some kind of veiled threat…"

"No no, I'm coming to that, if you'd let me finish?"

She wasn't stupid enough not to know that he was playing some more complicated game here, something other than citing her own biography to her and casually mentioning that, no, he wasn't just in Blume's system, but everywhere else he goddamn pleased.

"So here's the strange part. Of over two million people in Chicago, you are apparently the only one without _any_ dirty laundry."

"That's it?" she asked, she almost had to laugh. "That's _all?_ You… accuse me of being… not dirty? What is that? Is it beyond your imagination that someone is actually exactly what they seem? You've been spending too much time with Viceroys and Club members. It's skewed your perception."

"There is no one without anything to hide."

"You'd know all about that, wouldn't you?" she said with more of a sneer than she wanted. "Your record is far from clean."

He shrugged. "Homicide, aggravated assault, grand theft auto, computer tampering and fraud, identity theft, and I text while I drive."

She shook her head, barely exaggerated sadness there. "You aren't even ashamed. Your fans in the street, they don't see you for what you are. Not yet. They will eventually, you realise that, don't you?"

"If you could make any of that stick, you'd have done it a long time ago."

He was right, too. She had a very ugly smear campaign ready to go at a moment's notice. She had the numbers, even some of the footage, to show everyone just how little of the vigilante was actually viable hero material. He _helped_ people, sometimes, when they didn't happen to be in his way, when he didn't need to use and discard them for some other end. Sometimes that end seemed to be nothing more than his personal gain, like he was charging some kind of vigilante tax from the owners of online banking accounts throughout the city. She could _prove_ those things. It wasn't PR trickery at all. If he ever had to stand trial, he'd never see the light of day again.

To be unable to use all this against him was aggravating, but he was right. Any attempt by any official source, Blume or the city or even some coveted attempts, to bring him into disrepute, would just romanticise him further in the eyes of the public. She needed to bide her time, they all did.

She took a deep breath and decided to drop the topic. "I ask again," she said sharply. "You come here, do all this, just to tell me my record is clean?"

"I'm telling you your record sounds like a fairy story," he said, matching her tone. "What will I find if I dig a little deeper? What do you think? Do you want me to?"

"Dig all you want," she said with clenched-teeth defiance. "There is nothing there, you won't find anything."

"Really?" he asked lightly. He pulled his hand from his pocket, black-gloved hand and the phone it held, looked down at it contemplatively. He was playacting, she could tell. He probably didn't even _need_ the phone for any of what he was saying.

Despite everything, Gardner caught herself wondering what their programmers could do with that phone if they ever got their hands on it. They could probably tear Aiden Pearce out of ctOS, like bad weed, roots and all.

"Here's a very sad story," he said, as if he'd just spotted it. As he spoke, he slowly wandered around her desk and came entirely too close for comfort when he leaned against the table by her side. "Cyber-bullying one of your fellow students. Your friends here at Blume did a good job at hiding it, but that's the drawback of a system designed to preserve information, it just never goes away completely."

He looked down and directly at her.

"Poor woman killed herself," he observed with a kind of sinister cheerfulness.

Gardner said nothing. It wasn't too late to set off the silent alarm, was it? He was still stuck in this office with her, on top of a skyscraper filled with security guards. Taking him down would require sacrifices, of course. She had already written the statements.

She didn't want to be the subject of those statements, though. She didn't want to be his first victim tonight, or his hostage and meat shield on the way out. His coat had folded away, revealing, yes, he was armed. Strange, because _of course_ he would be, but seeing the gun just made it so much worse.

"What do you want?" she asked once more. She fidgeted a little in her seat, couldn't stop herself, in some attempt to gain distance between them without _seeming_ to do so. Looking at him seemed demeaning, not looking at him even more so.

He put his head a little to the side, just enough for the light from her screen to crawl up his cheek and catch in startling green eyes. "You should keep pursuing your career at Blume. Politics can be such a minefield. All I have to do is leak some hints to DedSec and they'll do the rest."

"You should have spared yourself the trouble," Gardner said slowly. She wasn't sure she wanted it this way. She should lie, tell him whatever he thought he wanted to hear and wait until he was out the door, then set off the alarm and hide while it all went down.

For a moment, he did nothing, just sat there, contemplating her. Then he moved, so fast it nearly pulled a shriek from her throat. He dropped his phone into his pocket, got away from the desk, gripped the back of her chair and swirled her around, brief disorienting vertigo making her blink. He dropped both hands to the armrests, leaning in.

"I give you _one_ chance," he said and there it was, the threat he had been keeping hidden until now. Nothing _veiled_ about it, nothing hidden, just the unspoken, razor implication of all the ways he could tear her life down. She sunk back in her chair as far as she could possibly go.

"You _really_ should take…"

All screens in her office flared to life, the large one on the wall, her desktop computer and even her laptop showed nothing but glaring white. Through the black glass, she could see the screen of her secretary's computer doing the same. You didn't need to be a genius to know every _other_ screen in the building was doing it.

Pearce was staring at her screen, the same as she did, surprise and anger making an odd combination of his expression. He hadn't moved away, but his focus was clearly no longer on her.

A black line pushed itself across the screen, splitting it in two, then it deflected to the sound of a heavily distorted voice.

_"Here's one from me to you, dear lovely drones of Blume!"_

There was a dramatic pause. Distracted as she was, Gardner still caught Pearce mutter, "Not her again," under his breath, so quietly it couldn't be meant for her.

_"This is SPARTAAAA!"_ Then the voice chuckled. _"Get clean, my precious! Yours truly, BlackMage!"_

Everything went dark, screens and light, but without the hard, familiar slap of a blackout as it kicked in. And the sprinklers went off, like a floodgate opening, drenching them completely in just one moment.

Pearce finally let go off her chair and stepped back. She could barely see him, now that the only light came from the cityscape outside, only the outline of him against it. She saw him pull out his phone again, saw it light his face and the sprinklers turned off again.

"Nevermind the interruption," Pearce said, but she thought she heard some strain in his controlled voice this time. "Take the chance I give you, I'm not generous."

As far as he was concerned, the conversation was done and he headed for the door, dismissed her entirely. She didn't know if the alarm even still worked, had no idea what _else_ BlackMage had done to their system. Three hackers, then. Not just Kenney and Pearce with this level of access, this new guy had it, too.

It made her wonder _who else_ was there, with their fingers firmly on the pulse. Any one of them could probably make it all fall to pieces at a hand-wave. Pearce wasn't doing it because he was riding too hard on ctOS' functionality. He might claim otherwise, but without it, he'd be _nothing._ Kenney, she had no inkling at all. He was in hiding, perhaps too embittered to realise what he could do.

No one knew what BlackMage even wanted, with his long string of bad and expensive pranks.

Wait. _Her._ Pearce had said _her._ He knew who this was and he didn't seem to be particularly thrilled.

"You know about BlackMage," Gardner accused and actually managed to stop him on his tracks. It wasn't enough to get him to turn back around.

"There's know and _know,"_ he pointed out roughly. "If I really _knew,_ I'd deliver her with her fingers broken and a bullet through the head."

It took her a long moment to figure out where the rancour in his tone was coming from. When she did, she had to stifle a laugh. Was it possible he had been on the receiving end of BlackMage's jokes, too?

"But you know more than we do," she insisted. Her own intensity drove her out of her chair and around the desk, after him. The soaked carpet gave in under her feet. "We could work together on this. You could give us what you have and…"

"I don't work for you," he said with finality and stepped out through the door where he had come from. In the darkness, outside on the hallway, she heard the dull sound of a brief scuffle. A security guard, no doubt roused by what had just happened, was unlucky enough to get in his way.

After a few minutes, probably with Pearce safely off the floor, the sprinklers were turned back on.

* * *

_"How do you make a con work? Always be prepared to go the extra mile."_

**Author's Note:**

>  _Seriously_ incomplete list of Aiden's crimes there, but he was on a schedule.
> 
> Black Mage/Magic is a reference to Richard K. Morgan's The Dark Defiles, because I can and because I've never loved anything as much as this book (and the whole damn trilogy.)
> 
> Nice updating I've got going. Gotta make hay while the sun shines and all. Pretty soon all my motivation will have ran out. That's why I'm fighting tooth and nail against starting a longer story. I seem to have only enough stamina for one-shots.
> 
> It was interesting to see how the tone of this story changed when I switched from using first names to surnames. It became noticably harsher.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Revised on**  
>  _31/May/2015 and 19/May/2016_


End file.
